My paternal grandmother was a teacher. Or, at the very least, that was one of the many hats she wore in the course of a very productive life. She noticed, at one point, that children passing through the school lacked knowledge of basic skills generally required for success in the system as it existed back then, and mostly now as well. She took it upon herself to create a course that would teach these skills, which had somehow not been handed down from parents to children over a long enough period that it was causing a breakdown of civil society. It continued well past the time that other schools were abandoning things like, civics, home economics, shop, and other similar classes/subjects. I am not one to praise teachers since I encountered so few worthy of it, and she was not a teacher to me outside of the role a grandmother has in an extended family, so I don’t know what kind of teacher she was first hand. I do, however, know what people wrote about here, and how they honored her for changing their lives. Excellent teachers are stewards of the future. A bulwark standing against decay. At least that’s how it seems to me. There’s an element of altruism in teaching. Giving of yourself even when your reward may not be much. Which is not to say that I think teachers shouldn’t be compensated, far from it, but the reality is that they rarely are. and few can maintain the drive in the face of overwhelming forces standing against them.
You might think that a person who was so civic minded and stern would discourage someone like myself from becoming an artist, or writer. Again, you would be mistaken. She felt that there was little point in maintaining a society where creativity was stifled. For what good is life if one denies the creativity that exists in humanity? She was truly a person of vision. What you might call a renaissance man if she were male. I suppose renaissance woman is the correct thing to call her, but it sounds strange. If there’s another, female, equivalent alas, I don’t know it.

I very much wish she was still around to look upon this thing I have created. Hopefully she would see value in my earnest attempt to improve the world with my meager skills. I wonder what she would say about it, or if she would be proud. Unless we are reunited with our families when we die that’s something I’ll never know. I was far too young when she passed to get to know her the way I wish I could now that I’ve lived nearly half a century. I suspect I would still feel very much like a buffoon pretending to be civilized as I did when I was younger. Even though she never tried to make me feel that way. Her presence simply made you realize how much you could be if you applied yourself the way she did. She was not one to knock others down. Her hand was always available to lift them up.

Anyway, like, comment, and subscribe. Hopefully I’ll see you back here on Monday. Until then, may the road rise to meet you.

This Post Will Confuse People.

by Jackie

The blog under the blog has always accidentally caught people by surprise. It’s original purpose was to present information on the homepage that wasn’t time sensitive. The rise of social media kind of made it superfluous, but now social media is falling away & the secondary blog seems like It might actually become useful again since Twitter isn’t the powerhouse it was half a decade ago. At this moment I’m just making this post so that the big image posts won’t appear on every comic page. It’ll just be easy to load text. Job done. Now I can go about doing some other stuff I need to do.